Memorial Builder’s Nazi Ties Stir Furor
They were enemies during World War II: the American soldiers struggling to defeat a fierce German military and Germany’s Philipp Holzmann construction company, which was racing to complete a Nazi aircraft factory with the aid of slave labor.
Now, in the latest flap over a World War II monument planned for the National Mall, U.S. officials have awarded a construction contract to Holzmann’s American subsidiary, sparking a barrage of criticism.
“When I found out about it, I said, ‘This is the United States. This is impossible,’ ” recalled Jack Brauns, 76, a retired physician in Covina who was among the forced laborers at Holzmann. “Is this the company to put up a memorial to honor war veterans? It’s immoral.”
The dust-up is the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the memorial, which is planned for the open vista between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. Critics have long derided the location and the design, which some view as reminiscent of Nazi architecture.
But those disputes seemed to be fading in the wake of a recent court decision that went against the critics and Congress’ passage of legislation that could lead to the monument’s construction starting in July.
Now the contract with Tompkins Builders, a Washington firm owned by Holzmann, has set off another uproar.
Said Si Frumkin, 71, a retired businessman in Studio City: “Holzmann was my owner and my father’s owner. We worked there for 13 months. My father didn’t survive. They murdered him. . . . Now Holzmann is building this memorial. I think it’s obscene. I can’t find the words. . . . Frankly, [the news] made my hair stand on end.”
This is not a universal view.
“To try to now make a connection between these American firms and what happened in World War II is unfair and absolutely irrelevant to the awarding of this contract,” said Mike Conley, spokesman for the American Battle Monuments Commission.
The latest episode began earlier this month when the General Services Administration awarded a $56-million contract to a joint venture of Tompkins Builders, a 90-year-old firm that has substantial experience working on national landmarks, and Grinley-Walsh, a separate, Maryland-based construction firm.
Tompkins and its American parent, J.A. Jones of Charlotte, N.C., are both owned by Holzmann, a giant construction company in Frankfurt. Amid the criticism, the U.S. firms have been quick to cite their experience working on national landmarks and in America’s World War II effort.
Tompkins, for example, built the West Wing of the White House, the east and west fronts of the U.S. Capitol, CIA headquarters, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
J.A. Jones, founded in 1890, was a major builder of military bases and shipyards for the World War II mobilization. Its shipyards manufactured more than 200 of the Liberty ships that ferried cargo around the world as part of the massive war effort and built a gaseous-diffusion plant that was part of the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb.
In an interview, J.A. Jones President John D. Bond III vigorously defended the “patriotism” of his firm. “I can understand” the concerns of Holocaust survivors, he said, but he insisted “there can be no better company than J.A. Jones” to build the World War II memorial.
As Bond sees it, the connection between the American firms and Holzmann reflects the realities of the global economy and the favorable development of Germany’s postwar embrace of democracy. In 1979, Holzmann took over Jones in a $75-million bid to strengthen its U.S. presence.
For its part, Jones was eager to broaden its reach overseas. Executives of both firms had met while doing work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Saudi Arabia.
“The whole issue of American companies in commercial relationships with German companies, German investors, Japanese companies, Japanese investors, is a positive story,” Bond said. To some, however, it is not so simple.
During World War II, Nazi officials steered many of the more physically fit Jews and others to labor camps rather than death camps, where they were brutally forced into the war effort. Brauns says he will forever remember his fellow slave laborers being pushed beyond their limits in a Bavarian aircraft factory concealed in a mountainside, as the besieged Nazi war machine rushed to deploy swifter aircraft against the Allies.
“You had people who could barely walk, and they had to carry 100 pounds of cement, and if they didn’t move fast enough, [Holzmann bosses] would beat them and kill them,” recalled Brauns, a native of Lithuania who later studied medicine in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1951. “I watched them.”
The argument that Jones and Tompkins are longtime American firms, unrelated to Holzmann during World War II, carried little weight with Brauns and Frumkin. Nor were they impressed with the observation that Holzmann’s management is an entirely different group of people than it was during the war. Both men have tried to sue the German firm for reparations in American courts, and both noted that the parent German company will benefit from the profits of its U.S. subsidiaries.
Holzmann is among the several thousand German companies that have contributed to a recently created $4.5-billion fund to compensate forced laborers, which may entitle them to about $6,500 for more than a year of forced labor.
Indeed, it was the symbolism of an important German war contractor being involved in the building of America’s National World War II Memorial that stirred such emotion. Both men lost immediate family members during the war--Frumkin his father, Brauns his brother--in addition to many other relatives.
“A piece of a highway, OK, let them do that,” said Frumkin of the U.S. subsidiaries. “But a memorial to American soldiers, some of whom were killed by things that Holzmann produced?”
Defenders of the memorial contract said the Tompkins joint venture was selected on the basis of its price, its experience on comparable projects and past performance. To discriminate against Tompkins because of its parent firm’s nationality “would be inconsistent with the principles for which the WWII generation sacrificed,” the monument commission said in a statement.
